Performing Community: Short Essays on Community, Diversity, Inclusion, and the Performing Arts

8/20/2019 Performing Community: Short Essays on Community, Diversity, Inclusion, and the Performing Arts

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By Blair A. Ruble

Performing Community :Short Essays on Community, Diversity,

Inclusion, and the Performing Arts

One Woodrow Wilson Plaza

1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NWWashington, DC 20004-3027

202 / 691 / 4000

www.wilsoncenter.org


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Performing Community :Short Essays on Community, Diversity,Inclusion, and the Performing Arts


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l 2 l PERFORMING COMMUNITY


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SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS l 3 l

The Wilson Center, chartered by Congress as the official memorial to President

Woodrow Wilson, is the nation’s key non-partisan policy forum for tackling global

issues through independent research and open dialogue to inform actionable

ideas for Congress, the Administration and the broader policy community.

Conclusions or opinions expressed in Center publications and programs are

those of the authors and speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views

of the Center staff, fellows, trustees, advisory groups, or any individuals or

organizations that provide financial support to the Center.

Jane Harman, Director, President, and CEO

BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Thomas R. Nides, Chairman of the Board

Public Members:

William Adams, Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities; James H.Billington, Librarian of Congress; Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education; David

Ferriero, Archivist of the United States; John F. Kerry, Secretary of State; Sylvia

Mathews Burwell, The Secretary, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services;

David Skorton, Secretary, The Smithsonian Institution.

Designated appointee of the president from within the federal government: Fred P.

Hochberg, Chairman and President, Export-Import Bank of the United States

Private Citizen Members:Peter Beshar, John T. Casteen III, Thelma Duggin, Lt. Gen. Susan Helms USAF

(Ret.), Barry S. Jackson, Nathalie Rayes, Earl W. Stafford, Jane Watson Stetson


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CONTENTSChapter 1- Performing Community Engagement / 1

The Sound of Music Is The Sound of Community Resilience / 1

Making Community Work: the Importance of the Performing Arts / 4

The View from the Bus: Rethinking Cities through Performance / 8

Dancing towards Revolution in Kyiv / 11

Theater and the Heart of a City: Moscow’s Teatr.doc’s Confrontation with Authority / 17

Porgy & Bess at 80: Rethinking Russian Inuence on American Culture / 21

Performance and Power from Kabuki to Go Go / 30

Acting Out Gentrication: Theater as Community Engagement / 33

“Beauty and the Beast:” A Tale of Entrepreneurship and Community / 36

Misty Copeland to Dance Swan Lake at DC’s Kennedy Center / 40

Chapter 2- Diversity, Inclusion, and Community Building / 42

The Devil is a Local Call Away: Cities, the Arts, and Misunderstanding “Decay” / 43

As Urbanization Accelerates, Policymakers Face Integration Hurdles / 46

After Baltimore, We Must See Community as a Process / 49

Fight not Flight: Lessons from Detroit / 52

Odessa: Ukrainian Port that Inspired Big Dreams / 55

How Cities Can Foster Tolerance and Acceptance / 59

Chapter 3- Planning for Inclusion and Creating Community / 64

Rethinking Engagement in Cities: Ending the Professional vs. Citizen Divide / 65

Innovation through Inclusion: Lessons from Medellín and Barcelona / 67

Detroit: Planning for a City of the Future / 70

Diversity by Design / 72

Discovering the Power of Community in Unexpected Places / 77


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The Woodrow Wilson Center’s Urban

Sustainability Laboratory began posting

short essays concerning the importance

of inclusion in an era of urban diversity

in 2012. This brief collection features

several of those essays by Urban

Laboratory Director Blair A. Ruble, with

particular attention being paid to the role

of community, diversity, inclusion and the

performing arts.

Contemporary British theologian PhilipSheldrake writes that, “cities have

always produced vibrancy. They not

only have a particular capacity to create

diverse community but, historically, they

have been the primary sites of human

innovation and creativity.”1 However, he

cautions, “human community in a fully-

developed sense is not something that

is simply automatic and unconscious. It

demands our commitment, a quest for

shared values, and a measure of self-

sacrice.”1 This is where the performing

arts, governance, and planning enter into

the equation.

The essays presented here have responded

to the challenges of diversity and inclusion

through the lens of the performing arts,

governance, and planning as the events

of urban life have played out around us.

They are intended to encourage readers tothink a little dierently about how cities are

evolving.

While the essays are by Blair Ruble, this

collection has beneted enormously from

the support and contributions of Urban

Sustainability Laboratory colleagues Allison

Garland, Thea Cooke, Genevieve Pagan

and Isabela Lyrio.

INTRODUCTION

Endnotes

1 Philip Sheldrake, The Spiritual City. Theology, Spirituality, and the Urban (Chinchester: Wiley/Blackwell,

2014), p. 13.


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Performing Community

Engagement


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l 1 l

On a recent pleasant summer evening, my

wife and I found ourselves at Washington’s

Southwest Waterfront listening to a free

sunset concert by one of the fabulous jazz

divas of our times, Washington’s Sharón

Clark. Sharón, who packs important clubs

from Broadway to Irkutsk and is frequently

compared by critics to Sarah Vaughn, was

performing before people who know and

appreciate what a special singer she is.

Many in the audience were enjoying thedelicious ribs served up by a nearby

barbeque stand, and most knew at least

one of the stellar musicians on stage.

Sharón was joined by her long-time

collaborators, Chris Grasso on keyboards,

Tommy Cecil on bass, Lenny Robinson on

drums, and sax-master Marshall Keys on

alto. Another familiar Washington musician

– drummer and trumpeter DeAndrey

Howard – worked the equipment mixing

the sounds perfectly. Everyone on stage

had grown up and studied in Washington

and near-by Baltimore before heading out

around the world to play with some of the

biggest names in contemporary music;

and all were back in D.C. adding a special

magic to the gentle Washington twilight.

There is nothing particularly noteworthy

about folks enjoying an outdoor concert

on a summer’s eve. Humans have been

gathering together to listen to music

for millennia, and, in doing so, have

created the sorts of connections among

themselves we now speak of as “social

capital.” The warm communal vibe

surrounding this patch of Washingtonwaterfront is repeated whenever rich

and poor porteños gather at a Buenos

Aires milonga to enjoy tango; Bluegrass

musicians bring their banjos and fddles

to a nearby Smokey Mountains general

story to play together and tell fanciful tall

stories; township marabi masters gather in

the corner of a Cape Town sheeben; and,

opera singers mysteriously descend on

the same central Moscow coee shop at a

time appointed by some force greater than

themselves. What makes such gatherings

so important is that the musicians – no

matter how accomplished and renowned

– are creating a moment of beauty that is

shared with a community.

The Sound of Music Is The Sound ofCommunity Resilience


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In the end, Soho and Bilbao remain

noteworthy because their successes can’t

be replicated based on a blueprint alone.

The arts, just as any other aspect of a

city, can be nurtured, encouraged, and

promoted but not invented whole cloth

from a glossy brochure or promotional

pamphlet.

The lesson oered by Sharón, Chris,

Tommy, Lenny, and Marshall isn’t that

grand arts projects are unimportant.

They all perform, after all, in places likethe Kennedy Center and Lincoln Center

as well as the D.C. waterfront. Rather,

they remind us that community resilience

is about shared communal experience.

From the beginning of humankind, the

magic of music has been shared by

people who might not have much else

in common. The sound of music is the

sound of community resilience.

Such concepts of community are not fairy-

tale-like musings, but have real practical

meaning. When thinking about building

community and securing place in order to

enhance societal resilience, policymakers

and social scientists need to bring the

arts into their notions of how to move

ahead. They need to think about the arts

not simply as monetized spectacle, but asshared experience creating and reinforcing

social capital.

A few years ago far away from

Washington, I found myself on an

escalator leading from the platforms to

Researchers and policymakers have

noted that communities which are more

thoroughly integrated before a natural

disaster or an outbreak of conict and

violence rejuvenate faster than those

communities in which people remain

distant from one another. Hefty scholarly

tomes and snappy policy briefs are being

churned out musing over just how the

social capital necessary for sustainable

community resilience can be secured.

As a lazy summery evening listening

to Sharón Clark — and enjoying the

company of others who share their love for

her music —demonstrates, the arts can

play an indispensable role in connecting

people so that they can live together in

resilient communities.

The notion that the arts enhance a

community frequently nds expression

in calculations of the number of jobs

cultural activities bring to a community, or

of the monetary value they add to local

real estate. Planners from cities around

the world long to replicate the success

of Soho in New York where, a generation

ago, artists proved to be the cutting edge

of renewal, higher tax revenues, and

gentrication. Even less spontaneously,

politicians speaking any number of

languages can’t seem to wait for star

architects to build some local version of

Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum. No one

can keep track of all the proposals for

“arts districts” and “cultural centers” that

are celebrated around the world.


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In subsequent years Kyiv has been

home to two revolutions, social and

political upheaval, and massive economicdislocation. Somehow, though, the city

continues to function and people are able

to live their lives. How can this happen?

Part of the answer is to be found in the

Monday evening metro dance club. Unlike

many post-Soviet cities which suer from

lingering government-manipulated social

anomie and alienation, Kyivians have

managed to knit social support networks

which help them through disruptions

unimaginable in most European and North

American cities.

Such social capital begins with the sort of

casual familiarity found whenever humans

come together to enjoy the arts. The

arts are not at all frivolous in an era when

generating and preserving social resilienceis central to community well-being.

Indeed, music and other arts may just be

where resilience begins.

July 29, 2014

the exit of one of the Kyiv metro system’s

major transfer stations. About half-way up

I began to hear the strains of joyous music,

raucous laughter, and singing punctuated

by uninhibited whistling. My imagination

failed me as I tried to understand what

awaited once the escalator reached the

top. I stepped o into an entry hall full of

dozens of seventy- and eighty-year-olds

folk dancing their way to ecstasy.

The next morning I asked a colleague

about what I had seen. He explained thatpensioners from all over Kyiv gather every

Monday evening in the station’s expansive

marble-lined entry hall to dance the hours

away. Centrally located, old folks from

all over the city could easily meet just by

hopping on the metro which retirees can

ride for free. Nothing more was needed

than an accordion and a bandura or

two. My colleague’s own grandmothercame every week to catch up with lifelong

friends who had dispersed too far away to

visit any other way. The retirees danced,

shared stories, and oered help to one

another.


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to Putnam’s seemingly unanswered

challenge. Song, after all, has bound

humans together for millennia and the

social interaction required to create

vocal beauty can be transferred to other

activities. Choral societies are not just

a reection of civic health, but may be

central to its origins.

The signicance of social capital for

civic well-being is more than theoretical

conjecture. A growing body of evidence

drawn from the responses to such recent

disasters as Hurricane Katrina and

Superstorm Sandy suggests that those

communities with the highest stores of

social capital before communal trauma

recover most quickly following both man-

made and natural disasters. Such capital,

in turn, does not require deep knowledge

of one another so much as a casual

sociability which allows neighbors and

colleagues to turn to one another in times

of crisis. The performing arts encourage

just such a geniality by bringing together

audiences and performers to share a

moment of conviviality.

The power of the performing arts to

create a sense of shared community can

be seen in contemporary Washington,

D.C. The city has suered throughout its

history from a stark, deeply embedded

racial divide; class separations between

those who have, and those who have

not; and most recently, tensions between

long term residents and newcomers who

Originally published on American

University Metropolitan Policy Center

webpage

More than two decades ago, in 1993,

Harvard Government Professor Robert

Putnam published his now classic

study Making Democracy Work: Civic

Traditions in Modern Italy. Trying toanswer the question why northern Italian

cities developed vibrant civic traditions

which came to support the growth of

democratic institutions and southern Italian

cities did not, Putnam was surprised to

nd a strong correlation between civic

health and choral societies. Putnam

masterfully argued that choral societies

emerged from the same broad reservoir

of social capital that is required to support

civic vitality.

Appearing just as countries throughout the

former Communist world were struggling

to create new democracies, Putnam’s

work became something of a Holy Grail

for promoters of a new political order. The

problem, however, was that Putnam’s

work failed to suciently explain how suchcivic virtue and social capital could be

created in the rst place.

Perhaps hard-nosed democracy

advocates pursuing measurable

advances towards institutionally-bounded

representative institutions considered

music little more than white noise. If so,

they may have missed part of a solution

Making Community Work:the Importance of the Performing Arts


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and creative dance and bringing renowned

national and international performers to

the nation’s capital. In 1986, as a fresh

wave of gentrication swept across Adams

Morgan, Perlo lost her lease. Concluding

that she could only protect her company

by purchasing space, she scoured the

city for an inexpensive yet spacious home.

Dance Place eventually ended up in an old

industrial building squeezed between auto

repair shops that backed up on a heavily-

used rail line that had recently provided the

right-of-way for the Washington Metro’s

Red Line. Just a couple of minutes’

walk from Metro’s Brookland – Catholic

University Station, Perlo had secured

her future, albeit in a rough and tumble

neighborhood that frightened many of

her students. Working assiduously to

reach out to neighborhood residents and

children, Perlo emerged as a focal point for

community activities reaching far beyonddance. Booking leading dance companies

from around the world – and establishing

increasingly displace those who have

come before. Moments and places shared

by Washingtonians of all races, ages and

beliefs remain unhappily rare. Those

pauses in city life where they exist —as

is evident in three particularly successful

performing arts centers – deserve

celebration.

Dance Place: During the mid-1970s,

native Washingtonian and aspiring dancer,

choreographer and teacher Carla Perlo

was searching for a way to pursue herlove of dance while remaining in her

hometown. Renting a loft in 1978 in

the as-yet-emerging Adams Morgan

neighborhood, she joined forces with

Steve Bloom to open Dance Place, a

touring educational and Performing Arts

Company that performed at the region’s

public schools. Immediately becoming

a friendly hub in an increasingly vibrant

dance community, Dance Place became

an energetic catalyst both teaching studio

African Dancers, by S Pakhrin/ickr


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from around the world. On any given

day, THEARC hosts performers visiting

from the four corners of the globe while

oering underserved children and families

dance classes, music instruction, ne arts,

academic, and recreational programs as

well as social services, mentoring, and

after school care at no – or aordable –

cost.

Westminster Church: A decade-and-

a-half ago, the Reverend Brian Hamilton

asked the Congregation of WestminsterPresbyterian Church, a few blocks from

the waterfront in Southwest DC, if he could

organize weekly jazz performances every

Friday evening. His goal was to provide an

entertaining night out for the community’s

retirees and to attract an audience from

the diverse corners of an all-too-divided

city. Charging a minimal $5 admission

fee – and oering scrumptious down-

home dinners in the basement – Hamilton

made music available to all. Under the

direction of former Redskin and singer

Dick Smith, “Jazz Night in Southwest”

quickly became a favorite venue for

musicians who valued the enthusiastic and

knowledgeable audience, the comforting

meals, and a three hour gig that stimulated

improvisation. A few years later, Hamilton

initiated a similar “Blues Monday” series.

Performances include aspiring students

and world-recognized veterans, school

teachers and military band leaders. The

audiences attract as diverse an array of

Washingtonians as can be found anywhere,

with identities being checked at the door.

The daughter of a Wall Street titan may

a ground-breaking annual DanceAfrica

DC festival – she put a previously

unknown corner of Northeast DC on

the international dance map. When the

gentrication tsunami reached Brookland a

few years ago, developers had to deal with

her rather than the other way around. She

masterfully converted a massive real estate

development down the street into an

opportunity to upgrade her performance

studios and education center.

THEARC: In the spring of 2006, acoalition of major Washington companies,

non-prot organizations, and businesses

opened the doors of the Town Hall

Education Arts and Recreation Campus

(THEARC) in one of the city’s poorest “east

of the [Anacostia] river” neighborhoods in

Ward 8. Led by inspiring educator and

community developer Edmund Fleet,

THEARC provided a $27 million state-

of-the art performing, rehearsing, and

teaching facility to Washington’s most

isolated residents. Working with William

C. Smith & Co. as well as such partners

as the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater

Washington, Covenant House Washington,

NFL Playground, KABOOM!, several dozen

foundations and major corporations,

and the DC Department of Housing &

Community Development, Fleet has

created the city’s liveliest arts center in its

least likely location. In addition to working

with community residents, THEARC has

become a favored performance venue

for local standout ensembles such as

The Washington Ballet and National

Symphony as well as touring companies


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great pride in presenting performers

from the District of Columbia and the

Washington metropolitan region. These

are not just “local” artists as many appear

around the world and around the country

bringing together global and local into a

single continuum.

Assets are Different from Profits:

Dance Place, THEARC, and Westminster

Church are not commercial venues –

and could not succeed commercially.

All three nonetheless add great value toWashington, including the very social

capital that will be so necessary should the

city and region confront calamity.

Resilience and adaptability increasingly

are seen as essential for community well-

being, particularly in the face of growing

challenges and dilemmas posed by natural

and man-made misfortune. Resilience,

in turn, requires expansive social capital

and vibrant civic life. Community vitality

requires that increasingly diverse neighbors

come to know one another, even if

only casually. The shared enjoyment

provided by the performing arts, as these

Washington examples demonstrate,

promotes a virtuous cycle that would

enable communities to move forward in

the face of adversity.

December 5, 2014

nd herself sitting next to Billie Holliday’s

drummer; the chief of sta of a powerful

Congressional committee might be

exchanging stories with a retired dancer

who hoofed across the celebrated stages

of the Apollo in New York and the Howard

in DC; while a twelve-year old trumpet

prodigy discovers the wisdom of James

Brown’s drummer. More than any other

moment in the week, DC becomes an

unpretentious community overowing with

social capital from six to nine every Friday

and Monday evening.

These remarkable Washington institutions

reveal partial answers to the question of

how the social capital required to make

democracy – and community – work

comes into being, including: leadership;

bringing global and local together; and

recognizing that assets are dierent from

prots.

Leadership Matters:

The stories of

Dance Place, THEARC and Westminster

Church begin with their visionary founders

and the sustaining leaders they have

nurtured around them. Social capital

must be created and promoted over time,

requiring the long-term engagement of

civic leadership.

Link Global and Local: Dance Place,

THEARC, and Westminster Church take


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of the state to subvert the arts to their

own purpose. What is happening in

Budapest is important; all the more so as

it is happening in a member state of the

European Union which needs to stand for

freedom of expression in deed as well as

refrain.

I was especially inspired by the work ofa new cohort of rising arts professionals

in their twenties and thirties who

are enlivening the arts at home and,

increasingly, abroad. As a person who

thinks about cities, I was particularly

taken by the performance of STEREO

Akt’s Promenade - Urban Fate Tourism,

which made me think about the city in new

ways.

STEREO Akt is the creation of an exciting

twentysomething director Martin Boross

who has been recognized as a rising

talent for some time. His high school

classmates, for example, fondly recall his

productions from just a few years ago

when he was a teenager. Well beyond

schoolmate fans, his work has won

enthusiastic reactions far and wide, withSTEREO Akt becoming integrated into

various European networks promoting

performance in public space. These ties

are critical as few funds are available at

home in Hungary to keep the company –

which already has half-dozen productions

under its belt — moving ahead. By co-

producing with European partners Boross

is able to cover costs at home and take

I was invited in early March to attend

the dunaPart3 – Hungarian Showcase

Arts festival in Budapest celebrating the

city’s vibrant performing arts scene. The

festival became an opportunity for the

international theater community to show

its support for Budapest colleagues

who are beleaguered by an increasingly

authoritarian government prone to usingpolitical, bureaucratic, and fnancial

levers to enforce compliance with their

nationalist-oriented agenda. Hungary’s

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán after all,

has spoken with admiration about the

accomplishments of Russian President

Vladimir Putin and recently hosted his

Russian colleague despite European Union

sanctions. Putin hardly provides a rolemodel for democratic leadership.

DunaPart3 brought more than three

dozen leading theater professionals from

the United States alone — organized

by the Center for International Theater

Development with support from the Trust

for Mutual Understanding—to see nearly

three dozen productions by over 25

companies together with multiple panel

discussions. For my part, I viewed nine

performances ranging from contemporary

dance by youthful companies to highly

polished theater productions, and heard

three panel discussions about the state

of the arts in Hungary. Overall, I departed

impressed with the professionalism and

creativity of the Budapest scene, and

concerned with the constraining power

The View from the Bus: Rethinking Cities throughPerformance


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husband and wife leaving one another; an

apartment maintenance worker quitting his

job over a dispute with an angry resident.

Over time, the audience begins to scour

the vistas from their seats trying to identify

the actors. Simultaneously, the mundane

actions of people on the street – neighbors

smiling into baby carriages pushed by

mothers, a homeless gentleman rifing

through garbage for food, beleaguered

bus riders waiting too long at their stops

for the next bus to come, children on a

playground waving at a bus full of people

wearing headsets – become performances

in and of themselves.

Some of the interaction is purposeful.

Boross and his team have invited

community members to add their own

stories to the narrative while volunteers

join in the action with the eight company

actors. Serendipity adds spontaneity to

the performance as the city becomes

implanted in the action.

The notion that the entire world’s a stage

is perhaps trite. The use of urban spaces

as platforms for performance has become

his talented team on the road to more

conducive venues across the continent.

In Promenade - Urban Fate Tourism, the

audience gathers in a late-Communist era

community center at the edge of historic

Budapest that retains the seedy ambiance

of an underutilized transportation hub

before climbing onto a non-descript city

bus. Once on the bus, the passengers

put on sound-blocking earphones and,

over the course of the performance,

listen to a mixture of soothing musicand narration. The eect converts the

communal involvement of being on a bus

into a deeply personal experience in which

every viewer is caught between the most

public of environments – the bus and city

streets – and the most internal – the space

between the earphones of a headset.

The bus departs, eventually ending up

in a down-on-its-luck pre-World War II

planned garden city district that becomes

a self-contained city within the city. Eight

actors play out various vignettes around

the theme of escape: a foreign tourist

escaping home on a vacation; a mental

institution patient running from a doctor; a

Photo courtesy of STUDIO Akt


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the city in new ways. Suddenly, a

maintenance man working on a gas line

becomes a performer; a young couple

embracing outside a college entrance

becomes actors. The city is more alive

with possibility than just ninety minutes

before. Budapest – and the Hungarian

arts scene – becomes full of potent

imagination, appearing to be less furrowed

by an unfriendly government. Boross

and the dozens of younger performers

participating in the dumaPart3 – Hungarian

Showcase Arts festival reveal that, despite

everything, Budapest remains a hot spot

of artistic invention.

March 16, 2015

the subject of enough learned tomes to ll

a library. STEREO Akt achieves a dierent

and unique window onto the interaction

of urbanite and urbis. The combination

of the mundane ride on a bus with the

internal realm amplied by the narrative

and music on headsets encourages

audience members to perceive a city

in dierent ways. We are all tourists in

our own lives, Boross proclaims; and he

expands inner knowledge by accentuating

that external reality.

Getting o the bus audience members

can greet the performers, who have

gathered to meet them. Everyone sets

o in their personal direction perceiving

The National Opera of Ukraine, by thisisbossl/ickr


18/85


luxurious production. His personal body

guard evidently viewed the break as an

opportunity to sneak o for a surreptitious

smoke. More than two score security

guards posted around the hall similarly

disappeared just as Dmitry Bogrov – the

son of a local Jewish merchant family,

secret police informer, and self-proclaimed

anarchist revolutionary – determinedlyapproached Stolypin. Bogrov raised his

gun and red; two shots hit Stolypin in

the arm and chest. The Prime Minister

died a few days later with the assassin’s

execution coming shortly thereafter,

leaving behind a tangle of conspiracy

theories which continue a century later.

Nothing so dramatic or lethal occurred

after the ballet performance in April 2013;

yet an act of intrigue once again presaged

regime collapse. In this instance, a weak,

incompetent, and corrupt Ukrainian regime

would be run out of the country a scant

ten months later.

The National Ballet of Ukraine has

managed to remain a national treasure

despite all of the political, nancial,and artistic upheavals of the past

quarter century. Like many other Soviet

companies, the Kyiv Ballet needed a

dusting o once the country fell apart

and cultural institutions long dependent

on state municence were tossed into

the international arts marketplace. The

company’s ballet school continued to

produce a steady stream of world class

performers – especially male dancers

Originally published by the Kennan Cable

The rhythmic hip-hop-like chants of

protest exploded just as the nal curtain

came down on the ower-laden ballet

dancers and the musicians who had

performed with them. Within seconds,

the bright lights of TV crews who had

forced their way into the orchestra seatsoverwhelmed as-yet dim house lights

when suddenly – as if on a cue from a

cameraman – four white banners poured

out of the fourth balcony enveloping

the hall below. To ever louder chants of

“Handba! Handba! Handba!” (“Shame!

Shame! Shame!”), the banners demanded

that the National Ballet of Ukraine retain

their artistic director Denys Matvienko. The

sumptuous Kyiv Opera House exploded

in chaos after a stunning performance on

April 13, 2013.

The Kyiv theater has seen more than its

fair share of politics-inspired disruptions

since opening in 1901. Most notoriously,

on September 12 (September 1 Old

Style), 1911, Nicholas II’s unforgivingly

conservative Interior and Prime MinisterPyotr Stolypin stood up after the

second act of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The

Tale of Tsar Saltan, turning his back to

the stage next to a ramp between the

parterre and orchestra seats. Perhaps

the Prime Minister had decided to use

the intermission to check out the Royal

Box, where Nicholas and his two oldest

daughters, the Grand Duchesses Olga

and Tatiana, had been watching the

Dancing towards Revolution in Kyiv


19/85


quickly added the Ukrainian capital to his

global network of partner companies.

The April 13 program combined two

of Clug’s most successful and beloved

works: Radio and Juliet , a retelling of the

Shakespeare love story to the music of

Radiohead; and Quarto, a striking abstract

chamber piece featuring two pairs of

male and female dancers on stage with a

pianist and cellist. Matvienko and his wife

Anastasia, who was born in Crimea, made

Radio and Juliet their signature piece,while Kyiv’s astonishing young dancers

performed Quarto (a piece which has won

praise from around the world including

a prestigious Russian Golden Mask

Award) as handsomely as any company

to be found. Kyiv audiences embraced

Matvienko’s vision, making the ballet a

magnet for the expanding younger post-

independence generation of professionals

and entrepreneurs.

Local audiences were not alone as the

excitement surrounding Matvienko’s

presence electried some of the world’s

leading stages. In February 2005, for

example, Jennifer Dunning wrote almost

breathlessly in The New York Times, that:

Denis and Anastasia Matvienko,

married dancers from the Kiev [sic]

and Bolshoi Ballets, provided more

than enough excitement. She is a

stylish dancer, but it was he who

stirred the crowd to noisy delirium in

the “Diana and Acteon” pas de deux,

hurling himself about like a throwback

to the days of wildly exhibitionistic

star dancing by the likes of Rudolf

Nureyev and Alexander Godunov,

– who headed out across the globe.

Oftentimes they signed with international

companies. New York’s American Ballet

Theater has hired numerous Kyiv trained

soloists and Corps members of note.

Kyiv dancers nonetheless return home

whenever their schedules permit them to

take time away from leading companies

in Moscow, St. Petersburg, London and

New York. The company has become, as

former US Ambassador to Ukraine William

Green Miller once quipped, “the best

company money can’t buy.”

Denys Matvienko was among those

who chose to return. A native of

Dniepropetrovsk, Matvienko spent his

career dancing in Kyiv, while also serving

as a leading soloist in Moscow, St.

Petersburg, New York, Tokyo, and Milan.

Approaching his midthirties, he was lured

back to Kyiv in November 2011 to serve

as the company’s Artistic Director and to

perform whenever possible. He quickly

set out to introduce more contemporary

ballets to the company’s repertoire.

Moving on two fronts, Matvienko added

new verve to the company’s standard

repertoire. For example, he replaced

the Pitipa’s well-worn choreography

for Minkus’ La Bayadère with a more

modern and energetic 1980s version

choreographed by the incomparable

Natalia Makarova for London and New

York audiences. Simultaneously, Matvienko

invited exciting contemporary artists to

bring their works to Kyiv, including Edward

Clug, a Romanian dancer whose striking

choreography has made the Slovene

National Theater one of the most exciting

companies of its size anywhere. Clug


20/85


At the beginning of February, I found

out that I am not the artistic director

of the ballet company of the Kiev [sic]

Opera and never have been. It was

just before the premier of La Bayadère

and I did not say anything immediately

to not cause a stir. The Director of the

Kiev [sic] Opera confirmed this fact. It

turns out that my contract, submitted

in November, is not signed. During

this time I was leading the company,

giving statements on tour, while not

knowing that I didn’t hold the role.

This is a flagrant violation, cheating

me and my artists. 2

The Matvienkos decamped for St.

Petersburg, where they continue to dance

as among the renowned Mariinsky’s most

popular Principal Dancers. But they did not

do so before Denys Matvienko appeared

whom Mr. Matvienko resembles

slightly. Dressed in what seemed to

be an animal-skin loincloth, blond

hair flying, he partnered his ballerina

as if she were prey whose flesh he

was about to devour and ended the

piece by looking as if he were going

to jump into her arms for a final,

unconventional ballet catch.1

Matvienko’s leadership symbolized

everything that post-independence Kyiv

youth wanted for their country: somethingthat was fresh, high energy, edgy, and

internationally appreciated, especially in

the West. They embraced his regime as

a symbol of a new Ukraine that would be

within their grasp if only their country’s

boorish, traditional in a Soviet sort of way,

and corrupt leaders would just get out of

their way.

A couple of days before the April 13

eruption inside the Kyiv Opera House, the

leadership of the theater and their masters

at the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture – run

by particularly distasteful cronies of the

country’s convicted criminal-turned president

Viktor Yanukovich – “fred” Matvienko

as the company’s artistic director. Citing

artistic and personal dierences, the Opera

Theater’s management revealed in abizarre announcement that Matvienko had

never been “hired” at all. Evidently, once

Matvienko signed his contract in November

2011, management sent his employment

documents to superiors who never had

been bothered to countersign.

In a press conference on the eve of the April

performances Matvienko told reporters:

Wilson Briefs l June 2014

We live in a time of cities, as well as in a time of migration. A new urban reality has arisen

with the influx of mobile populations often related to the globalization of economic and

communication flows. Cities around the world have become agglomerations of ethnicities,

religions, classes, and nationalities.

Creating socially sustainable cities that can accommodate migrants and their diversity

requires policies that nurture shared identity and maintain spaces whose use can be shared

by everybody, promoting a pragmatic pluralism and a culture of tolerance.

How Cities Can Foster

Tolerance and Acceptanceby Blair A. Ruble

Cities throughout the world face ethnic, racial, religious, and national diversity

as a result of widespread migration. Despite instances of communal strife,

diversity can be accommodated and even acknowledged as beneficial to

the city. To achieve this, cities should create public spaces—both real and

symbolic—to be shared by all and should reinforce the common necessities,

especially commercial ones, that have brought the city together.

SUMMARY

photo by Luis A. Gomez


21/85


appearance of television cameras to

record the asco – and its retelling in

social media and at city coeehouses

in the days and weeks to follow – was

about more than the ballet. It was an

early salvo in a growing rebellion against

the Yanukovych regime itself. Protests

erupted a few months later in November

2013 after Yanukovych refused to

sign a political association and free

trade agreement with the European

Union, touching o weeks of at times

bloody civil strife which ended with

the President and many of his minions

eeing the country in February.

The history of the performing arts

overows with demonstrations and

conicts which often are about clashes

well beyond the interior of any theater.

Paris was rocked between 1752 and

1754 by the Querelle des Bouons, a

struggle between proponents of comic

Italian opera bua and defenders of

French tragédie lyrique, a genre favored

by supporters of the royal court. The

conict began with a riotous attack

on iterant Italian comic actors ( bufoni )

during a performance of Giovanni

Battista Pergolesi’s La serva padrona

at the Académie royale de musique.

Paris quickly divided into defenders of

a national French style led by Jean-

Jacque Rousseau, Friedrich Melchior

Grimm, and Christoph Willibald Gluck,

and champions of Italian music such

as Niccoló Piccinni. Opera served as

a surrogate for a conict between an

emerging new French statist-nationalism

in the mutinous audience assembled

on April 13 to watch substitutes Aniko

Rekhviashvili and Anastisia Shevchenko

(the latest in a long line of Kyiv-produced

rising global ballet stars) exquisitely

perform in the Matvienkos’ signature

roles in Radio and Juliet .

The world of post-Soviet ballet has been

marked at times by as much drama

o-stage as on. Just weeks before

Matvienko’s “dismissal” in Kyiv, the

Bolshoi attracted its share of unwantedheadlines after an attacker paid by

disgruntled soloist Pavel Dmitrichenko

threw acid into the face of artistic

director Sergei Filin in a dispute over

performance assignments. Only a few

years earlier the Bolshoi attracted further

notoriety when management terminated

the contract of prima ballerina Anastasia

Volochkova for being too tall and heavy.

Matvienko’s conicts with management,

however, assumed meaning beyond

personal and artistic dierences.

Under President Yanukovych, a number

of key educational, scientic, and cultural

appointments had been turned over

to strikingly incompetent supporters

and party members who appeared to

be more interested in collecting tributethan enhancing standards. Within this

context, the public humiliation of a hero

of Kyiv’s western-oriented youthful

elite instantly became entwined with

growing anger over what they saw as

an illegitimate regime. The shouts from

the top balcony of the opera house, the

ying banners, and carefully orchestrated


22/85


of maiden sacrice. Anger grew as

mockery turned into physical attacksthroughout the evening. The uproarlasted until Maria Piltz’s nal “Sacricial

Dance,” spilling over into the city’smost fashionable neighborhoods. Classand incompatible visions of the futurecollided; pitting fashionable traditionalistsagainst modernists wishing for a neworder throughout a Europe perchedon the edge of a cataclysmic centuryahead.

The raucous upper balcony protestors inKyiv and their sympathetic supporters inlower tiers of the Kyiv Opera House weregoing far beyond showing support fortheir dismissed idol, Denys Matvienko. They were proclaiming their collectivedisgust with the incompetent andcorrupt state ocials who forced him

to leave. Unlike other more famoustheatrical clashes, the audience warmlyembraced the evening’s performancesof both Radio and Juliet , and Quarto.Instead, they saved their ire for, to theirminds, the illegitimate decision-makerswho were stealing their world from them.While there is no way of knowing forsure, many if not most of the evening’sprotestors undoubtedly appeared on

the city’s streets during the Euromaidanprotests that eventually dispatched Yanukovych and his foul hangers-onfrom their country months later.

French economist and former Presidentof the European Bank for Reconstructionand Development Jacques Attali haswritten that music often has presaged

on the one hand and cosmopolitanembrace of Euorpean cultural styles onthe other.

About a century later, in May 1849,one of the worst riots in New York Cityhistory exploded as Irish and Americanworking class supporters of the nativeactor Edwin Forrest surrounded andattacked the Astor Opera House wherethe English actor William CharlesMacready was performing Macbeth

before an audience of upper class Anglophiles. The three sided-meleepitting immigrant, nativist, and upperclass New Yorkers against one anotherleft some 25 dead and 120 injuredbefore the city police and state militiarestored order. The immediate causemay have been the serendipitousappearance of the era’s two leadingShakespearean actors performing thesame role in theaters just a few blocksfrom one another on the same night.More importantly, New York was a cityincreasingly divided by class, race, andnational origin; divisions that wouldcontinue to disturb public order in thedecades ahead.

More legendarily, the premier of Igor

Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring byDiaghilev’s Ballet Russes at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysés on April2,1913 erupted in shouting and derisivelaughter even before conductor PierreMonteaux took up his baton. Protestsbecame ever more intense as thedancers on stage began to perform Vaslav Nijinski’s choreographed rites


23/85


Endnotes

1 Jennifer Dunning, “A Night of Fun as the

International Stars Turn,” The New York Times,

February 14, 2007.

2 “Denis Matvienko is ‘red’ as artistic director

of the Kiev ballet,” Gramilano. Ballet. Opera,

Photography, April 9, 2013.

3 Jacques Attali, Bruits: essai sur l’économie

politique de la musique. Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France], 1977, as translated

in Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy

of Music, translated by Brian Massumi

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

2011).

broad social, political, and ideological

shifts.3 Music and other performing

arts, he argues, reect a future that is

being born because they give form and

structure to people’s deepest fears and

hopes about the world around them.

The Matvienkos continued to thrive

in St. Petersburg despite a string of

nasty injuries and the growing Russian-

Ukrainian conict. In November 2014,

Denys Matvienko had a triumphant

return to Kyiv to lead a reformedNational Ballet of Ukraine in an imposing

new production of The Great Gatsby.

Described as the most ambitious ballet

project ever undertaken in Ukraine,

Matvienko managed once again to place

his artistry at the center of the on-going

drama of Ukrainian transformation.

December 15, 2014


24/85


The arrival of a swarm of investigators

accompanied by an NTV television

crew is but the latest in an increasingly

aggressive game of cat and mouse

which began during the autumn between

Moscow authorities and the tiny Teatr.

doc. Threatening closure, increasing

rents, and relocation to a forsaken outer

corner of galaxy Moscow, those in powerare making clear that they want Gremina’s

diminutive theater to go away. In fact, the

lm screening was to have been the last

event before the company relocated to

Bauman Street on the other side of central

Moscow.

The December 30 raid becomes

even more disquieting as the police

were already quite busy that evening

arresting nearly 300 of the thousands of

demonstrators who had converged on

the Manezh Square next to the Kremlin,

just a couple of kilometers away from

Teatr.doc, to protest the conviction of

opposition leader Alexei Navalny on

fraud charges earlier that day. One might

have thought the gathering of a handful

of theater patrons would constitute too

small a challenge for the regime at such

a moment. Indeed, the mystery is why

does Vladimir Putin’s government fear a

minuscule drama company operating from

a Moscow basement?

On the evening of December 30, 2014

— just as two dozen or so patrons were

settling into their seats at a purposefully

ramshackle basement theater in central

Moscow to watch a lm about the ongoing

conict in Ukraine — police ocials and a

television crew entered the hall, declared

a bomb threat, and asked everyone to

evacuate. Despite the declared urgencythat a bomb might go o, the police

checked and recorded the documents of

everyone in the audience and requested

that they wait in paddy wagons parked

outside for their own protection. When

questioned about the wisdom of taking 45

minutes to evacuate the site of a possible

explosion, the police began to change

their story without even a pretense ofveracity. Eventually three of Teatr.doc’s

animating gures – Maksym Kurochkin,

Stas Gubin, and Seva Lisovsky – were

taken o to a nearby police station for

questioning.

All three would be released before

sunrise. Much of the scenery for the

company’s productions fared less well,

being destroyed by the raiding police.

Summoned to the Ministry of Culture

the next day, Kurochkin and Teatr.doc

dramaturge and company leader Elena

Gremina were told that the raid could have

been worse and, if they like, the Ministry

could call the police and have them return.

Theater and the Heart of a City: Moscow’s Teatr.doc’sConfrontation with Authority


25/85


Eighteen Minutes based on the transcripts

of the investigation into the death of

Russian whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky

while in police custody. By touching on

such taboo subjects as the Magnitsky

case – and, more recently, the unfolding

tragedy in Eastern Ukraine – Teatr.doc

established itself as a prominent voice

of measured criticism against a regime

seemingly allergic to all that it cannot

control.

Teatr.doc has assumed far more meaningthan its tiny basement venue and

limited audiences might suggest. The

past decade has become recognized

internationally as one of the most

productive in the long, esteemed history

of Russian theater. Plays that powerfully

reveal and challenge society’s conventions

and deceptions have caught the eye of the

international theater community, which has

embraced the Russian stage as among

the most innovative of our time. That

notoriety, in turn, made theater companies

such as Teatr.doc especially vulnerable

to an assault by the defenders of Putin’s

vision of moral imperative. With leading

international gures such as Moscow

Times critic John Freedman and Center for

International Theater Development director

Philip Arnoult closely following the rise

and now threatened New Russian Drama

renaissance, the whole world has been

watching what transpires at Teatr.doc.

A distinctly local historical dimension to the

story might be as signicant for amplifying

Teatr.doc’s importance. Throughout the

past century, Moscow has witnessed

Teatr.doc represents much more than it

might seem at rst glance. Founded by a

group of rising playwrights in 2002, Teatr.

doc quickly established itself at the center

of the “New Russian Drama” that took

shape in the late 1990s. Prompted in part

by support from the British Council, dozens

of talented young Russian playwrights

embraced “documentary theater” which

draws inspiration from people and events

witnessed in everyday life.

For much of the new millennium’s rstdecade, dozens of theaters sprang up

across Russia, often in economically

traumatized industrial cities such as

Yekaterinburg, Togliatti, and Perm. A score

of young writers garnered the attention

of the international theater community as

their plays were translated into several

languages and performed on stages in

London, Washington, Chicago, New York,

and other major world theatrical cities.

Rooted in the British in-your-face theater

tradition, the Russians made the genre

their own. Unlike European documentary

productions, Russian playwrights

and directors managed to identify

transcendental moments of embedded

humanity which lifted their stories above

supercially mundane tales of rape, pillage,

crime, and corruption.

Moscow was somewhat late to the party,

though the establishment of renegade

companies such as Praktika and Teatr.doc

quickly closed the gap between capital

and province. Teatr.doc in particular

demonstrated courage by producing

Gremina’s powerfully unnerving One Hour


26/85


him to turn directly to Stalin for permission

to remain at the Theater; a request that the

Great Leader granted. Unable to publish,

Bulgakov joined the Bolshoi Theatre sta

for a while. During this period Bulgakov

began writing his best-known work, The

Master and Margarita, which was

published in 1966, twenty-six years after

his death.

The Master and Margarita and the limited

circulation of Bulgakov’s other works made

the writer a hero for generations of lateSoviet youth. His apartment, a walk-up

in a courtyard just o the manic Garden

Ring, became a site of pilgrimage for

Moscow students. Impromptu stairway

concerts and ubiquitous grati turned the

otherwise ordinary building into a make-

shift shrine subject to constant skirmishes

between authorities and disaected

youth. Searching for an explanation

for the absurdities of Soviet life, young

Muscovites embraced and celebrated

Bulgakov’s anti-rationalism. Now cleaned

up and converted into a small museum

for Moscow denizens of a certain age,

Bulgakov’s apartment is one of the city’s

most potent spiritual monuments.

Bulgakov set the opening of The Master

and Margarita at Patriarch’s Pond Park just around the corner. This is where

his ctional literary editor Mikhail Berlioz

and young poet Ivan Ponyrev (whose

penname is “Homeless”) encounter the

Devil in the form of a foreign tourist. Their

chance meeting famously ends with a

streetcar severing Berlioz’s head, which

rolls down the cobblestoned street before

humanity’s most toxic pathologies on

an extravagant scale beyond rational

comprehension. Sites of mass arrest,

brutal executions, and mundane betrayals

lurk behind the city’s recently shinning

facades at every turn. Like the ghosts

of Berlin, the troubled spirits of Moscow

create a phantasmagorical substructure

just as real to those who know it as any

metro map or post-Soviet oce tower.

Teatr.doc’s basement sits in the middle

of one of Moscow’s most scorching

otherworldly hot spots, located a block

away from Patriarch’s Pond in one

direction and a ve minute walk from

the apartment of Soviet writer Mikhail

Bulgakov in the other.

Kyiv-born Bulgakov was trying to combine

a medical career with writing as World

War I broke out. Sent to the front with

a medical unit, Bulgakov began using

morphine. While he stopped using the

pain killer after the war, his writing —

beginning with an account of his own

addiction—Morphine — became infused

with a fantastical quality that eventually

placed him at odds with the Stalinist

regime. Relocating to Moscow following

the Russian Civil War, his accounts of

early Soviet life, including The White

Guard about a White Army ocer’s family

in Kyiv and The Heart of a Dog in which

sensitive male organs are transplanted

from a human to a dog who is transformed

into a pitiless Commissar, challenged

many of the Soviet government’s

fundamental precepts. Working with the

famous Moscow Art Theater, Bulgakov

inevitably tangled with censors, leading


27/85


that they too appreciate the theater’s

symbolism.

The police assault on Teatr.doc the

night before New Year’s Eve is about

far more than a small basement stage

unknown to seventeen or eighteen million

Muscovites. Teatr.doc represents a

commitment to truth and beauty leavened

with international respectability and local

consequence in the face of a rapacious

and vicious regime.

Political scientists heatedly debate the

nature of Putin’s Russia. Is it a throw-

back to the Soviet era? An authoritarian

nationalist regime? A kleptocracy engaged

in little more than racketeering on a large

scale? Yet Russia often oends a rationalist

mind bent on categorization. Walking

to a performance at Teatr.doc in winter’s

darkness prompts other thoughts much

more connected to the neighborhood’s

streets. Bulgakov’s colossal malevolent

black cat Behemoth is loping across the

Moscow cityscape yet again.

January 7, 2015

the knowing eyes of a giant black cat,

Behemoth. The remainder of the novel

tracks the Devil’s course around Moscow

with Behemoth coming to represent an evil

that has descended on an unknowing city.

For contemporary expatriates living in

Moscow, Patriarch’s Pond is a charmingly

gentried neighborhood that has climbed

to the apex of the city’s outrageously

expensive real estate market. For

knowing Muscovites, however, Patriarch’s

Pond is where the Devil arrived in townwith every stray football seemingly

becoming Berlioz’s head and every black

cat growing to gigantitude. For those

Muscovites, Teatr.doc – located more

or less halfway between Bulgakov’s

apartment and Patriarch’s Pond – sits

in the center of a quarter that exists in

a mythical Fifth Dimension. Within this

local urban context, Teatr.doc is a living

link in an ongoing confrontation between

art and power. By forcing the company

to relocate to the opposite side of central

Moscow, the authorities have shown


28/85


Those present knew they were witnessing

history. Gershwin’s reputation and

ambition suggested that his opera possibly

was a work for the ages. An earlier

play Porgy that Heyward and his wife

Dorothy had based on the novel had been

a hit in 1927. The opera’s tryout opened

to rave reviews in Boston just days before.

Everyone who was anyone on the New

York culture and social scene wanted to

be seen; and many were. Major

newspapers dispatched their most

important drama and music critics such

as Alexander Woolcott, Brooks Atkinson,

Virgil Thomson and Olin Downes.3

Hollywood flm actors Leslie Howard, Joan

Crawford, and Katherine Hepburn joinedopera singer Lil Pons and playwrights

Elmer Rice and Ben Hecht, novelists Edna

Ferber and J. B Priestly, as well as

musicians Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heiftz,

Paul Whiteman and Fred

Waring. Boisterous curtain calls seemingly

lasted for ever. The all-night cast party at

Condé Nast’s Madison Avenue penthouse

attracted the likes of William Paley,Marshall Field, and Averill Harriman.

For the next three-quarters of a century,

one question has hung over everything

that transpired on stage that evening:

What, precisely, is Porgy and Bess? A

musical? An opera? High—or

middlebrow – culture? A sympathetic and

Originally published by Cosmonauts

Avenue

Eighty years ago, on October 20, 1935,

New York’s Alvin Theatre hosted one of the

most important performances in the

history of American musical theater: the

Broadway premier of George and Ira

Gershwin and DuBose Heyward’s“American folk opera” Porgy and

Bess based on Charleston literary notable

Heyward’s 1925 best-selling novel Porgy .1

The Alvin has opened just a few years

previously at the height of Broadway’s

most prolifc season in 1927 and sits (now

as the Neil Simon Theatre) on the south

side of West 52 Street between Broadway

and Eighth Avenue in the heart of New York’s raucous theater district.2 A survivor,

the landmark playhouse has, over the

years, witnessed many a memorable

evening since Alex Aarons and Vinton

Freedley (ALex & VINton = Alvin) launched

their new stage with Fred and Adele

Astaire hoofng their way through George

and Ira Gershwin’s Funny Face. Ethel

Merman, Lucile Ball, and Liza Minnelli

made their Broadway debuts on its

famous stage while Cole Porter and Neil

Simon opened some of their most

successful productions at the historic

auditorium. But no evening has as lasting

an impact on American – and indeed

world – musical theater as Porgy and

Bess’s gala premier.

Porgy & Bess at 80: Rethinking Russian Infuence on American Culture


29/85


exceptionally talented and highly skilled

African American performers — constitute

a prototypical tale of how twentieth

century America transformed world culture

by mixing and matching previously

unblended traditions into a vibrant and

innovative entirety.5 It is a story of how

one city — New York — enabled

immigrants and their children to transform

how Americans viewed themselves and

the world around them.

Theater is a product of collaboration

among many artistic associates. This was

especially true of Porgy and Bess.6 The

story’s rst creator — the sickly DuBose

Heyward — inherited considerable social

prominence and little wealth from his

distinguished Charleston family (his

great-great-grandfather signed the

Declaration of Independence). Deciding to

become a writer, Heyward tossed asideselling insurance to devote time to his new

craft. Looking for a tale to tell, he picked

up a local Charleston News and

Courier on his way to have breakfast one

morning at his sister’s place down the

street from an eighteenth century

courtyarded building inhabited by African

American workers and servants known as

“Cabbage Row.” He read a story abouthow a memorable crippled beggar Samuel

Smalls — well-known for getting around

town in a cart drawn by a goat — had

been arrested for aggravated assault after

having attempted to shoot Maggie Barnes.

DuBose and his wife Dorothy — an

Ohio-born playwright whom he had met at

path breaking treatment of African

American life; or a racist regurgitation of

demeaning stereotypes? Enthusiastic

audiences aside, critics were divided

about the show, often disparaging George

Gershwin as little more than an overly

ambitious pop music parvenu. If he had

written an “opera,” why was it being

staged in a music hall? Given its large

scale and decidedly mixed reviews Porgy

and Bess unsurprisingly lost money during

its 124 performance New York run. Its

investors only earned back their money

from a successful national tour to follow.

Careers have been made as scholars,

critics, musicians, politicians, and social

commentators have struggled to dene

this “American Classic.”4 One undeniable

dimension of the Porgy and Bess tale was

answered denitively as soon as Abby

Mitchell launched into the opening notes ofthe show’s rst melody “Summertime.” No

matter how one responds to the questions

swirling around Porgy and Bess, no one

can deny the transcendental beauty of

George Gershwin’s score.

The opera’s creators sat nervously towards

the back of the orchestra – or ground oor

– that rst night trying to discern howothers were reacting to their creation.

George Gershwin was next to Kay Swift,

the leading woman in his life who was

herself an author of musical dramas. The

paths bringing Gershwin together with his

co-creators – including his brother Ira, the

Heywards, a number of Russian-trained

musicians and directors, and dozens of


30/85


DuBose’s stories – he wrote other African

American oriented works as Jasbo Brown

and Other Poems (1924), Mamba’s

Daughters (1929) and the screenplay for

Eugene O’Neill’sThe Emperor Jones (1933)

– appeared at a time when white

Americans knew little or nothing about

African American life and culture.8 While

now dated and long open to charges of

promoting derogatory stereotypes,

DuBose works stand out among other

white writings of the era as unusually

knowledgeable about and sympathetic to

African American culture.

The animosity of native born whites

towards African American cultural

achievement is dicult to grasp from the

distance of decades at a time when

American culture has been thoroughly

infused by blends of black and white,

“high” and “low.” It ran deep. As critic-historian Joseph Horowitz has noted,

many white Americans at the time believed

that African American music was

“essentially white melodies appropriated

by ignorant slaves.”9 White interest in

black music usually took the form of a

white performer appropriating black music

for himself and earning money from it

rather than anything approaching cross-racial collaboration. Signicantly,

prominent European observers of

American music had no diculty

appreciating how any American “national”

musical style must blend indigenous,

European and American traditions. As

Horowitz tellingly adds, the act of

immigration aorded “a clarity of

New Hampshire’s MacDowell Writers’

Colony — collaborated in writing what

became one of 1925’s top literary hits, the

novel Porgy . Dorothy saw Porgy ’s

theatrical potential and adopted the tale for

the stage. Produced by New York’s

prominent Theatre Guild and directed by a

gifted young Armenian Rouben

Mamoulian, Porgy the play proved to be

one of the great successes of one of

Broadway’s most successful seasons in

1927-1928. That remarkable year

witnessed an all-time high of 264 plays and

musicals, including arguably the best

traditional musical of all times, Show Boat .7

Porgy ’s success rested on more than a

compelling, if melodramatic, story.

DuBose had been fascinated since

childhood by the African Americans on

whom every white person in Charleston

depended in any number of ways. Hismother Jane had become something of an

amateur specialist on the region’s

distinctive “Gullah” language and culture

that had been handed down from

generation to generation among the

descendants of West African slaves

brought to South Carolina to farm rice.

Probably derived from the word “Angola,”

“Gullah” refers to a form of English infusedwith vocabulary and grammatical

structures preserved from several West

African languages. African inheritances

marked their communal arrangements and

religious practices. Like all Charleston

children of his social station, DuBose grew

up surrounded by Gullah-speaking

nannies, servants, and workers.


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Oscar Hammerstein II, joined with African

American performers to tackle such taboo

subjects as inter-racial marriage in Show

Boat .14 German-born composer Kurt Weill

partnered with African American poet

Langston Hughes on the musicalization of

Elmer Rice’s play Street Scene and wrote

the “black” musical Lost in the

Stars.15 One among immigrants and

immigrant children who saw value in

African American culture was George

Gershwin, a Brooklyn-born son of poor

Jewish parents from St. Petersburg,

Russia who soaked up the sounds of his

hometown as his family moved around

from Brooklyn’s East New York to

Manhattan’s Lower East Side and

Harlem.16

Gershwin demonstrated his musical

acumen as soon as he sat down at a

newly purchased second-hand familypiano for the rst time at the age of twelve

and immediately started playing songs. By

fteen, he was playing in bars and took

jobs in “Tin Pan Alley,” the hub of New

York’s music industry. He connected with

the legendary Irving Berlin and Jerome

Kern among many and soon began writing

popular tunes for Broadway shows.

All the time he frequented the city’s

emerging jazz scene uptown in Harlem, he

also scouted New York’s vibrant Yiddish

musical theater on lower Second

Avenue. Early twentieth-century Yiddish

theater set standards for innovation

unmatched on Broadway. Often more

accessible to highly trained East European

understanding unencumbered by native

habit and bias.”

The accomplished Czech composer

Antonín Dvořák presciently captured this

future most succinctly when, during his

time in New York in the 1890s, he declared

that ”Negro melodies” would create a

distinctive “American school” of operas,

symphonies, art songs, and chamber

works.10 Perhaps Dvořák, a butcher’s son,

was more open to the accomplishments of

outsiders; perhaps as an outsider he

simply could hear what prejudiced native

ears could not.11 What he said was

unwelcome. Native-born American white

musicians and critics dismissed Dvořák as

hopelessly naïve. The imposingly

authoritative Boston music critic Philip

Hale went so far as to call the Czech

composer a “negrophile,” which is how a

proper Brahmin would have mimicked theRedneck “n_____ lover,” and is no less

repugnant for Hale’s unmatched

erudition.12

Dvořák was hardly alone. Any number of

the immigrant artists who transformed

twentieth century performing arts

enthusiastically collaborated with African

Americans. To cite just a handful ofexamples, celebrated Georgian-Russian

choreographer George Balanchine, who

had danced with Josephine Baker in Paris,

worked closely on several projects with

Ethel Waters, Katherine Dunham, the

Nicolas Brothers, and Todd Duncan.13

Master songwriter and son of German

immigrants Jerome Kern, together with


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respected man. Moving from success to

success on the Broadway stage, the

Hollywood screen, and saluted at the most

famous European concert halls, Gershwin

was nothing if not musically ambitious. He

cared deeply about creating a distinctive

American classical tradition. It was in this

context that he had set out to write the

“Great American opera.”

The term used by Gershwin in labeling his

masterpiece a “folk opera” has deeply

confused American critics. Dvořák and

other Slavic creators would have needed

no explanation as they simultaneously

drew on local “folk” music and traditions to

create distinctive national operatic

traditions. Gershwin was well aware of

these connections, comparing Porgy and

Bess to Boris Godunov and Carmen

(indeed, the Gershwin opera closely tracks

Bizet’s Carmen). Such comparisons madelittle sense to insecure Americans who

measured cultural accomplishment against

what they romanticized to be Germanic

and British standards. Those more familiar

with national operatic traditions emerging

in Southern and Slavic Europe better

appreciated the close connections

between opera and folk traditions.

Unsurprisingly, Porgy and Bess

gained

recognition as a major operatic triumph

throughout Europe. Americans eventually

could no longer deny the signicance of a

masterpiece that had been validated

enthusiastically on the stages of Milan,

Venice, Vienna, Berlin, Copenhagen,

London and Paris. After circling the globe

professionals than the English-language

stage, innovators such as seminal stage

designer Boris Aronson, the son of the

Grand Rabbi of Kyiv, and Odessa native

director Jacob Adler conducted their most

protean experiments on Yiddish stages

from the upper Bronx to lower

Manhattan.17 Gershwin thus drew on

multiple inuences as he tried to dene for

himself what it meant to be an “American”

musician.

Responding to a commission from Paul

Whiteman for a concert piece bringing

together jazz and classical forms,

Gershwin wrote his now iconic Rhapsody

in Blue (1924), which he followed

with Concerto in F (1925) and the concert

piece An American in Paris (1928). These

works, to cite Horowitz once more,

contributed to a growing American “vibrant

piano repertoire, deeply inected by slavesong, and ranging from [Louis Moreau]

Gottschalk’s Banjo and [Scott] Joplin’s Maple

Leaf Rag to the Transcendental profundities of

Ives’s Concord Sonata and the jagged urban

rhythms of Aaron Copland’s Piano Variations.”

Set on writing an American opera,

Gershwin began looking for a story to put

to music. One night, unable to fall asleep,he picked up a recent best-seller, Porgy .

The next morning he wrote to the

Heywards, initiating a creative journey that

would last nearly a decade.

By the time he had completed Porgy and

Bess, Gershwin – the toast of Broadway

and Hollywood — was a wealthy and


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They were joined by veteran Vaudeville star

John W. Bubbles as Sportin’ Life and were

backed by Harlem’s Eva Jessye Choir and

Charleston’s Jenkins Orphanage Band.

The presence of so many talented and

highly trained African Americans came as

a revelation to many critics and audience

members; one that helped to transform

how white Americans and Europeans

viewed black American talent.

Americans born in the Russian Empire

similarly played a pivotal role in bringing

Gershwin’s score to production. Rouben

Mamoulian, who had directed the

Heywards’ earlier play Porgy , grew up in a

prominent Armenian theatrical family in

Tiis (today’s Tbilisi). As a young man he

moved to Moscow where he studied with

the legendary Evgenii Vakhtangov at his

Studio Theater of the Moscow Art

Theater.19

Smolensk native Serge Sudeikin had

become a prominent stage designer in St.

Petersburg before joining Serge Diaghilev

and his legendary Ballets Russe in

Paris. He is remembered still in St.

Petersburg for his wall paintings at the

famous futurist watering hole The Stray

Dog Cabaret, where he would have spenttime discussing emerging cultural fashions

with such Silver Age notables as writers

Nikolai Gumilov, Mikhail Kuzmin,

Vyacheslav Ivanov, Vladimir Mayakovsky,

Boris Pasternak, Maria Tsvetaeva, Sergei

Esenin, Alexander Blok, and dancer

Tamara Karsavina.20

and being performed across the United

States, George Gershwin’s monumental

“folk opera” nally entered into the

repertoire of New York’s exalted

Metropolitan Opera in 1985, more or less

simultaneously with its rst performance in

Charleston and a full half-century after it

premiered at the nearby Alvin Theatre.18

In bringing their libretto and music to stage

Gershwin, his brother lyricist Ira and the

Heywards enlisted scores of tremendously

talented people. George Gershwin

insisted on an all-African American cast, a

stipulation that has remained central to the

granting of performance rights. The

composer’s demand both made Porgy

and Bess a launching pad over the years

for prominent African American singers

and performers ranging from William

Wareld (Porgy) and Leontyne Price (Bess)

to Maya Angelou (Carla) and LorenzoFuller, Jr. (Sportin’ Life); and kept such

white performers as Al Jolson from

performing the role of Porgy in blackface.

While many white critics questioned

whether there were sucient numbers of

African American performers to ll out an

opera cast, Gershwin had little doubt as

he sought out his singers and actors. Thelegendary original cast featured Howard

University music professor Todd Duncan

as Porgy, Baltimore-born Julliard student

Anne Wiggins Brown as Bess, Mississippi-

born Julliard graduate Ruby Elzy as

Serena, classically trained Abby Mitchell as

Clara and New England Conservatory of

Music product Warren Coleman as Crown.


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meaning, even if his American critics

couldn’t grasp the concept. It represented

the fusion of European and American

traditions that immigrants trying to nd

their way in a new home would

understand far better than pretentious

native cultural gatekeepers.

Together, these artists brought American

musical theater closer and closer to the

Russian concept of “total theater,” which is

not surprising given how many gifted

immigrants working on the New York stage

during the rst half of the twentieth century

had worked or trained with Moscow theater

giants such as Vakhtangov (producer

Mamoulian), Konstantin Stanislavsky (actor

Michael Chekhov), Vladimir Nemirovich-

Danchenko (actress Alla Nazimova), and

Aleksandr Tairov (designer Boris Aronson).22

Stanislavsky’s inuence solidied when the

master himself visited Gotham with a troopof Moscow Art Theater actors in 1923 and

again in 1924.

Porgy the play, and Porgy and Bess the

opera, were hardly the only successful

collaborations among African American

and Russians on the New York stage. The

seminal 1940 Broadway production Cabin

in the Sky (which later moved to the

Hollywood screen), brought the towering

Russian-born trio of composer Vernon

Duke (Vladimir Dukelsky), designer

Aronson, and choreographer Balanchine

together with Richmond-reared lyricist

John Latouche and a stellar African

American cast including Ethel Waters,

Todd Duncan, and Katherine Dunham

St. Petersburg native Alexander Smallens,

who was brought to the United States as a

child, conducted the original 1935

production of Porgy and Bess as well as

Performing Community: Short Essays on Community, Diversity, Inclusion, and the Performing Arts

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